A Toolkit for Compliance, a Toolkit for Justice: Drawing on Cross-sectoral Expertise to Develop a Pro-justice EU AI Act Toolkit

2025-05-22

AI Summary

Current AI governance tools under the EU AI Act often lack integration between legal compliance and socio-ethical considerations, resulting in either overly technical checklists or abstract ethical frameworks disconnected from regulatory implementation. Method: This project develops a dual-oriented AI governance toolkit—legally compliant and socially just—through an interdisciplinary UK–Italy collaboration involving academia and industry. It employs co-design, participatory action research, cross-sectoral workshops, and policy–technology mapping analysis to bridge the gap between normative abstraction and operational pragmatism. Contributions: (1) A practical, process-integrated AI Act compliance toolkit embedding ethics-by-design across the AI lifecycle; (2) a reusable methodology for academia–industry–civil society co-development of governance tools; and (3) a globally applicable “compliance-to-justice” paradigm for AI governance tool development, advancing both regulatory adherence and structural equity.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance
• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Technology governance, policy, and regulations
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

The introduction of the AI Act in the European Union presents the AI research and practice community with a set of new challenges related to compliance. While it is certain that AI practitioners will require additional guidance and tools to meet these requirements, previous research on toolkits that aim to translate the theory of AI ethics into development and deployment practice suggests that such resources suffer from multiple limitations. These limitations stem, in part, from the fact that the toolkits are either produced by industry-based teams or by academics whose work tends to be abstract and divorced from the realities of industry. In this paper, we discuss the challenge of developing an AI ethics toolkit for practitioners that helps them comply with new AI-focused regulation, but that also moves beyond mere compliance to consider broader socio-ethical questions throughout development and deployment. The toolkit was created through a cross-sectoral collaboration between an academic team based in the UK and an industry team in Italy. We outline the background and rationale for creating a pro-justice AI Act compliance toolkit, detail the process undertaken to develop it, and describe the collaboration and negotiation efforts that shaped its creation. We aim for the described process to serve as a blueprint for other teams navigating the challenges of academia-industry partnerships and aspiring to produce usable and meaningful AI ethics resources.

Problem

• Developing a pro-justice EU AI Act compliance toolkit
• Addressing limitations in existing AI ethics toolkits
• Bridging academia-industry gaps for practical AI ethics resources

Innovation

• Cross-sectoral collaboration for toolkit development
• Pro-justice focus beyond mere compliance
• Blueprint for academia-industry partnership toolkits